Already a performance touchstone, Performance Day is spreading its wings as part of the Centre Pompidou's 40th anniversary celebrations. Six international curators are joining forces for the programming of a festival combining the visual arts, theatre, film, music and literature, with a particular focus on the French and Portuguese scenes. Performance Day is presenting fifteen artists, eight premieres, two exhibitions and Digressions, a new collection of conversations with artists.

For Performance Day, the six curators will be looking into the topic of the museum performed: in practical terms how does a museum make history, what living memory does it build up, and what future is it modelling? To what extent does it contribute to a process of reification and at what point in time does it become a malleable object, transformed by historical, discursive, gestural and fictional sedimentations?

Since the 1960s–1970s artists have been constantly challenging the museum as institution: its representational codes and dominant forms of rhetoric, its capacity to reify and standardise, its modes of exhibition and dissemination, its relationship with archives and collections, and the role it assigns to viewers and transmission.

Today a whole generation of artists is revitalising what used to be called "institutional criticism" via alternative narratives that are allowing subjective, minority and subaltern voices to be heard. At once poetic and political, their proposals grant pride of place to the invisible and the intangible, and to receptivity and attentiveness. Via interpersonal give and take, talks, guided tours, handling of objects and musical and theatrical interpretations, artists are performing singular stories of museums and art collections.

What is the Performance Day ?

In 2016, La Ferme du Buisson inaugurated Performance Day, an annual performance festival whose international programming would include curators from abroad with an emphasis on coproductions and freedom of movement for artists. Given artists' growing interest in an interspace between the visual and the performing arts, our art centre is broadening its approach to include other other sections of La Ferme du Buisson, and thus other resources, with a variety of projects involving the entire site: theatres, studios, outdoor spaces, the media library and so on. In this fundamentally multidisciplinary context these hybrid practices using performance as an active force in the transgression of boundaries find unequalled scope for experimentation. Deliberately concentrated into a single day, the festival will give visitors the chance to share a unique experience as they stroll from event to event and from space to space in a truly remarkable setting.

With this second edition the festival is spreading its wings, joining in the Centre Pompidou's 40th anniversary celebrations and happening in two different venues: La Ferme du Buisson and the Centre Photographiqued’Ile-de-France. The programming has been arranged in association with the Centre Photographiqued’Ile-de-France, Frac Ile-de-France and Serralves-Museu de Arte Contemporânea in Porto, which came up with its own "Museum as Performance" programme in 2015.

SoixanteDixSept [SeventySeven]

Via the SoixanteDixSept [SeventySeven] project three key contemporary art venues in Seine-et-Marne (France's département no. 77) are recalling the emblematic date – 1977 – of the opening of the Centre Pompidou, that "power plant for decentralisation", and reviving the spirit of an era on a broad geographic front. The project takes a look at a specific vision of art and society, a crucial utopic impulse that still fuels contemporary creativity. This reassessment forty years down the track brings an understanding of the museum's active role in history, as a force for conservation but also for shaping a future.

The 40th anniversary of the Centre Pompidou

The Centre Pompidou celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2017 everywhere in France. To share its anniversary with a wider audience, the Centre Pompidou will be presenting a completely new programme of exhibitions, outstanding loans and various events throughout the year. Exhibitions, shows, concerts and meetings will be staged in 40 French cities in partnership with museums, contemporary art centres, performance halls, a festival, a key player in France’s cultural and artistic fabric and many more.